The Yonderist

All those who wander are not lost.

Tag: computing Page 2 of 4

An Open Company

2009-04-04

work

Sometimes the series of connections that is the internet (not the wires but the ideas) is truly amazing. As many readers of this blog know, my editor of choice is Textmate. Textmate made quite a hit when it premiered on the Mac platform, which up until that time really only had BBedit for users in need of a heavy-duty editor. (Was XCode available and useful then?) BBedit had a free version, but if you wanted the full version, it was expensive. Textmate was €39 — which was closer to $39 then than it is now. Textmate also possessed the amazing ability to be extended in utility by its users, who quickly proceeded to share bundles of snippeds, commands, and macros with each other.

Linux and Windows users who saw Textmate, perhaps through David Hansen’s famous Rails screencasts, wanted to know when its developer, Allan Odgaard was going to port his application over their preferred platforms. Allan steadfastly refused, and in a move that surprised everyone, seemed perfectly happy when Alexander Stigsen began to develop an editor not only a lot like Textmate but also one that could use adapted Textmate bundles — the very engine of Textmate’s success. I occasionally checked out the E Text Editor, but because I don’t work on Linux or Windows, I never paid any serious attention.

All that has changed with Stigsen’s announcement that he is going to turn his stable, profitable, conventional software company into an open company.

What does that mean? The first thing he has made the application’s source open — except for a small, central portion that he maintains as proprietary. The next step is to set up a venue in which individuals can participate and begin to feel their way around the project — the code, the tasks at hand, the procedures. What he hopes will happen is that as some individuals become more interested in working, they will find themselves commensurately compensated. (The mechanism he has planned is worth reading on his site.)

Why is this an interesting series of connections? Because these kinds of enterprises are exactly the kind of thing that I think we should not only be studying in the academy but also replicating.

Adding the XHTML Closing Slash Automatically in Textmate

2009-03-26

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This is just one of those tips that is so amazing that I have to note it down. As many readers know, one of the rules that XML has that is not part of HTML is that all tags must be closed. Thus, the IMG and BR tags in HTML are something of a problem for the child of the marriage of XML and HTML: XHTML. The solution was to add a self-closing slash just before the closing angle bracket. For example: <br />. It turns out that my text editor of choice, Textmate, has the ability to do this for you:

In TM’s Advanced preferences, in the Shell Variables segment, add a new variable named TM_XHTML with the value of / (single slash) and you will get this trailing slash everywhere you use a singleton tag, without editing any of the snippets.

Research into Writing

2009-03-21

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As the research for the boat book began to pile up — goodness, especially the things in the “need to read” queue — and I felt the urge, or need, to begin writing, I felt I needed to revisit my “workflow”, workflow here being “how I do what I do.” One of the conclusions I came to, comparing how I did things ten or fifteen years ago with how I am doing them now was that I got a lot accomplished using paper. Perhaps more than I am getting accomplished digitally, which makes no sense because digital notes are a lot more searchable. What’s the problem? I wondered. I think it all comes down to interface. I really like working with paper. I like pens, pencils, and paper. I like working on my Mac, but I haven’t found the interface that works the way I do.

Here’s how I understand my process:

  • Inputs are all the materials that I collect: books, articles, tear sheets, field notes. These are raw.
  • Intermediate forms are summaries, quotations, and responses to topics and arguments found in the texts above.
  • Output takes the form of chapters in a book (in the current moment.)

As the materials travel through their transformation from raw, unprocessed texts into useful summaries or quotations, they need to have, at the very least, be tagged with citation information. Other tags — by topic, area, etc. — would be useful, too.

A number of folks I know are very fond of DevonThink, and DT2 promises to have tags, which might make it useful for me. I can almost see the interface and the data structure that would work for me, but I do not have the time, at the moment, to hammer it out. (I would need not only the time to code such a thing but to learn how to code.)

Free Fonts

2009-03-01

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Most people I know are content to use the fonts that came with their computer, and thus the ubiquity of Times and Verdana. Occasionally you come across a Mac user who cannot let go of Palatino. There are people, like me, who can’t quite seem to give up Helvetica, which I use on this blog if only because one can be fairly certain that almost every computer in the world has it or the Microsoft equivalent, Arial.

Most Macs also come with a few nice looking faces like Gil Sans, Hoefler, and Garamond. Over the years, I have also invested in a few faces that I regard as basic: Adobe’s Minion Pro, for a change of serif face, and Myriad Pro, because it is a nice sans serif alternative to Helvetica and is in widespread use on signs and diagrams: people respond to it well.

Too many people I know take type faces for granted or, perhaps worse, don’t realize that type faces are not necessarily to be shared liberally. There is a way around this: acquire and use quality free type faces. And since you asked, I do have some recommendations:

  • Gentium is an open source font — using something called the SIL license — that allows for a wide range of uses, including commercial applications, that comes in both a a face that contains a full range of glyphs as well as Gentium Basic which has the most commonly used glyphs found in Western European alphabets. There is also a slightly heavier version of the latter, Gentium Basic Book. Download it. Use it.

  • Another open source font collection is Bitstream’s Vera. It comes with a full range of faces, including a monospaced face that I use on my Macs while working in Textmate. Here’s the Bitstream sampler graphic:

vera

Bitstream’s Sampler of the Open Source Vera Type Face

In addition to these, what I could consider core, faces, I also recommend checking out the following sites or pages:

And, of course, you can always make your own free font.

AppleScript Resources

2009-02-16

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I spent part of my time with the flu trying to figure out how to convert a collection of old Word documents into Markdown-fomatted plain text files. I determined that textutil is close to useless in this regard because it does not maintain headings, instead preferring to collapse headings into a styled paragraph. To get to HTML, then, I will need to use Word itself, which means AppleScript or Automator. I need to first open a document, then save it as HTML.

Microsoft’s Site for Mac Developers is here.

UPDATE: It looks like Microsoft does have an Automator Workflow that does what I want, but the bundle of workflows does not come with the Student and Teacher Edition. Thanks, MBU!

Here’s a guy who’s written a book and released some podcasts on automating Office.

Ruby 1.9.1 Released

2009-02-02

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More news is available at Ruby Inside. With all the changes, maybe it was a good thing I put learning Ruby on hold. Maybe?

Hard Drive Housekeeping

2009-02-02

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Every once in a while you have to figure out where all the space is going on your hard drive, because 250GB seemed like a lot when you ordered the machine a year or two ago.

Work iMac

Specifications Size (GB)
Capacity: 232.57
Used: 203.41
Available: 29.15
Folder Size (GB)
Archive-ALL 18.98
Archive-DOCS 5.35
Desktop 10.97
Documents 3.87
Downloads 30.20
Library 2.69
Lr 35.19
Movies 3.97
Music 6.86
Pictures 6.55
Public 0.00
Sites 0.57
Total 125.2

30 gigs of downloads? There’s some space-saving right there. 11 gigs on the desktop? Half of that is probably downloads I haven’t sorted yet. Sigh. Yes. I use my desktop all too often as a giant inbox. The two Archive directories makes me wish OS X had an easy “merge” command.

Pinching in iPhoto’s Map View

2009-01-30

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Pinching in iPhoto’s Map View can be enabled by opening a Terminal window and typing the following:

defaults write com.apple.iphoto MapScrollWheel -bool YES

Flickr apps for iPhone

2009-01-30

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Macworld has a review of three iPhone apps that allow you to work with your Flickr account. I don’t see anything that transforms my current workflow, but it’s nice to know they are there. Here’s the review.

Quick Video Resolution Guide

2009-01-24

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This post is really for my wife, who is helping to organize a conference. A number of presenters want to use media as part of their presentation. The problem is that everyone brings not only a range of equipment but also a range of expectations and knowledge about what it is they are doing and what can be done. I passed onto her a recent development in my own professional organization: in the last year, the American Folklore Society has recently decided to standardize what audio-visual equipment it can afford to provide to its members at our annual meeting. The core of that equipment is an LCD projector with a VGA connector. (No resolution is provided, I suspect, because that would require more sophisticated conference/convention AV vendors than currently fill those ranks — feel free to correct me if you’re a vendor and you do provide resolutions: I’ll write about you and I’ll suggest we have a meeting in your town.)

In the particular case of this conference, they will be using two projectors that I know fairly well. Both of them are XGA resolution, or 1068 x 764. A quick run-down of 4:3 aspect ratio resolutions is as follows:

Name Resolution (pixels)
VGA 640 x 480
SVGA 800 x 600
XGA 1024 x 768
SXGA 1280 x 1024

The 4:3 aspect ratio is the one we are all used to seeing everytime we look at a regular, old television — the resolution of which, in case you wanted to know, is something like 720 x 480, but what was actually viewable was something less — remember the black bars you would see when adjusting the Vertical Hold knob (usually awkwardly located on the back of the set)?

Now, as if all those acronyms aren’t bad enough, especially for people who still think PowerPoint presentations have to have bullet points, there is also the matter of how you connect your computer to the projector. Here’s the port that most Windows laptops have on them:

SVGA_port
Windows PC VGA Port

The VGA port will carry all of the resolutions above, despite the fact that it seems like an acronym mismatch. My advice to her and the conference organizers was to say something like this to presenters:

The conference will provide an LCD projector capable of 1024 x 768 resolution in the room in which you will present. The projector will be equipped with a VGA cord. Please plan accordingly.

So, presenters will have to determine two things:

  1. Are my materials in a format that will view well at 1024 x 768? and
  2. Do I have a way to connect by VGA?

If they have a port on their laptop like the one above, they’re in good shape. If they have any other kind of port, they are going to need to bring some sort of dongle.

Mac users, who have suffered the slings and arrows of Apple trying either (a) to advance video display technology and/or (b) look for ways to sell add-ons, are long used to the idea of dongles. My new MacBook comes with the new mini-DisplayPort port, which, with any luck, just might stick around and become a standard. For now, however, every time I travel to a conference, I have to carry around this dongle:

MDP-to-VGA-dongle
My new conference companion: Apple’s Mini-DisplayPort to VGA adapter

This conference attendees will need to make sure they are similarly equipped. Some new, higher-end laptops may very well not possess the blue VGA port above but may, instead have a white DVI port. They make converters — or, if they bring a cord, our LCD projectors also have a DVI In.

Good luck!

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© John Laudun